


Postcards from Ursa Minor

by alphahelices



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23951626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alphahelices/pseuds/alphahelices
Summary: She hasn’t told this crew about the stars, or her father, or even Akuze. But Kaidan’s another earthborn a million lightyears from home, and here he is looking at the stars.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard, Kaidan Alenko/Shepard
Comments: 14
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

She grows up with her eyes turned to Orion and Cygnus. In the evenings before her father leaves for Arcturus, he brings her to the darkest parts of the city. He points at the stars and traces shapes for her. One by one, he names old warriors and mythical beasts that ancient humans painted in the skies with the light from long-dead worlds. He rubs her back if she’s tired, or traces tiny constellations in the thick freckles on her cheeks, and sooner or later she points to Mars or Venus or something even further and asks if she can go there, someday. And every time he says _of course, but take me too_ , and then they talk about what it would feel like to fly through space, faster than light.

She imagines it feels like a bicycle accident, head over handlebars, the moment where your stomach lurches and the earth falls away. Only there’s no mouthful of gravel afterward, no scraped knees or bruised elbows among Perseus and Ursa Major.

When he gets the assignment on Arcturus, she makes him promise— _cross your heart_ —to remember what it feels like to fly a spaceship and tell her as soon as he can. When she gets the voice message, the day after he lands, there’s wonder in his voice as he tells her _oh honey, it’s like nothing I can describe_.

Her mother works too late to take her to the darker streets to look for stars. Her freckles fade as winter comes and the constellations her father used to trace on her cheekbones disappear. Still, she falls asleep every night dreaming of a wind-in-her-hair, heart-in-her-throat acceleration away from earth and toward the stars. Like nothing he could describe.

* * *

There comes a day when Shepard is older that Momma doesn’t get out of bed. Shepard walks herself to school and comes home and her mother is still there. It’s three days before the doctors run their blood counts and cultures and antibody reactivity tests and come back with another number, three to six months.

The countdown is at one to four months when Shepard hears her mother in the other room recording a voice message to travel across the lightyears to her father on Arcturus base. There’s too much space between them and too much lag in communications for an actual conversation, so her mother speaks briefly and uninterrupted. She pronounces the name of the virus in her blood and she says the number (it echoes in their tiny apartment, one to four one to four one to four) and she says _I love you_ and Shepard does not hear her cry.

While Shepard is at school the next day her mother packs a bag and checks herself into the hospital. Shepard comes home to a darkened apartment and a blinking red light on their message machine.

The first message is from her mother, telling her the number of her hospital room, speaking softly from the linoleum echoes of beeping machines and hurried footsteps. The second message is from her father, and his voice sounds so small and scared that she could cry just listening to him.

* * *

It should have been three to eleven weeks still, but when Shepard goes to the hospital (every day after school) the doctors are grim faced and the nurses speak so gently she could cry. Her mother stops speaking after six days in hospital but there’s still light in her eyes, so Shepard lays beside her in the hospital bed and points at the ceiling. It’s an old one with pebbled paint, randomly scattered black dots against the off-white ceiling tiles, and Shepard looks for her constellations in the paint dots.

She shows her mother, _look Momma, it’s Cassiopeia. Look, Bootes, and that one there is Arcturus, wave to dad,_ and together they wave at their imagined star.

* * *

The doctors start saying two to three weeks, but Shepard’s mother is the kind of woman who’s never been big on obeying authority. Shepard arrives after school and one of the nurses sits her down and holds her hand, and Shepard argues _you promised me fourteen more days_ but it makes no difference.

She goes home to the empty apartment that night and doesn’t even turn on the lights, just goes straight to the message console and tries to reach her father. The tone sounds and the message starts recording and she realizes she can’t say the words, can’t say what has happened, so she just cries into a recorded message, wordless and aching and raw, until she reaches the time limit and the system hangs up on her.

* * *

She goes to school the next day and they learn about acceleration and the forces involved in lifting a rocket from the grip of earth’s gravity. She draws vectors and calculates velocities and thinks about the feeling of leaving earth, of leaving all this behind, of how light the weight in her heart would be in the vacuum of space.

There’s a message from her father when she gets home. He’s trillions of miles away, and today she hears every one of those miles between them when he tells her to keep her chin up, _ah, I promise it will get better, kid_.

Shepard doesn’t have a lot of faith in promises anymore, but she keeps her chin up.

* * *

The credits come to the family bank account on earth in regular installments. It’s enough to keep the lights on in the empty apartment and for Shepard to find her own meals after school. She lives off boxed meals and takeout and promises herself it’s only until she turns 18, when she can join the alliance and her father on Arcturus. She counts the days until her birthday and dreams of spaceships launching, over and over.

It’s six months out from her birthday when the alliance soldiers show up at her door to tell her in person that her father’s ship met with an enemy missile, and every member of his crew was killed under the light of a foreign sun. They hand her the last of her father’s paychecks and they offer their apologies, sincere and genuine and _meaningless_ , and then she is alone again.

She keeps her chin up, and turns the lights off. Electricity is expensive, and she has so few credits to last her the next six months. With time her eyes adjust to the darkness, and with the curtains open, she can see the stars.

* * *

She registers with the alliance on her 18th birthday and the credits in her bank account run out three days before she is sent to Arcturus base for training. She’s hungry when she boards the shuttle departing earth. Still, she is clear-headed when she straps into her seat and her heartbeat is calm and steady when the engines come to life beneath her.

The launch is unimaginably violent and loud; her bones rattle so hard she’s dizzy in an instant. Her head is spinning and she imagines she can smell the burning rocket fuel, feel the thousand degree heat, feel every unit of force trying to pull her back planetside. She’s so close to fainting she can’t even see.

And then the air resistance fades to nothing as the atmosphere dissipates and disappears outside the ship. The cacophony fades into silence and then excited chatter of the other soldiers around her. Her vision comes back in blurry shades of grey until her head stops spinning and the cold sweat across her skin begins to dry. Her heartbeat slows and her temperature stabilizes, and the goosebumps on her skin fade away.

She opens her eyes. Outside the ship, she can see the earth, a serene leviathan. And beyond it, sparkling brighter than she’s ever seen, are the stars.

The silence around her feels like the whole universe waiting.


	2. Chapter 2

It is unusual for her to have roommates after so many years in an empty house. They are surprised at her when she forgets to turn the lights on, after all those months agonizing over electric bills and her ever-shrinking bank account. One of them mocks her for not knowing how to cook, and before she can stand up for herself he insists on teaching her.

She peels garlic while he browns butter and talks to her about knives and spices and heat, a whole science she never imagined before. The dormitory kitchen smells like heaven and he guides her step by step through a recipe with gentle encouragement and only occasional teasing. The stove is hot and there’s sweat on her skin when he leans over and kisses her. He tastes like garlic and salt and a comfort she hasn’t had before.

He teaches her more too, in the nighttime after they cook together. His touch is like the spreading heat of cinnamon and the sound of his hushed voice in her bed is sweeter than honey. It’s not family; it’s not what she dreamed of finding on Arcturus, but it’s not worse or better. It’s new, a new feeling, a new lurch in her stomach and a new source of goosebumps. A new driving beat in her heart.

In the mornings they cook breakfast, omelets with chilies and red pepper and enough flavor to wake them up after late nights. Then they train, all day long, separate and together. When their mission assignments start to roll out, they end up on the same crew, and Shepard is surprised that for once things seem to be working out.

It’s six months later that they’re sent to Akuze together.

* * *

She’ll remember the rumble of a thresher maw emerging until she dies, she knows. The way the ground shakes, slow and gentle at first like a distant humming, and then deeper and more violently until the ground erupts all around them and she watches her crewmates picked off one by one. They’re in a panic, running for shelter with the soil bucking and heaving beneath their feet. The air is full of screams. She hears bones cracking. In an instant, she learns that the sound of a skull breaking open is so thin and reedy, cracking eggshells and snapping matchsticks. She’ll hear it in her dreams for years. She’ll hear it in her waking moments for months.

Clouds of dust and pulverized rock fill the air. It’s night, but even the brightest stars are obscured. The world is browns and greys, settling on her skin and in her eyes like ash.

She watches the carnage unfold and still she is surprised when the rescue ship comes and they tell her she is the only one left. There are so many bodies, some in pieces, after the ground goes still again. Some part of her had imagined one or two of them must still be breathing.

She helps bring the dead aboard and into the med bay where they are stripped of their helmets for identification. She learns the sweet grassy smell of an opened skull, in the med bay among her dead crewmates. The way marrow spills out of a broken femur, thick and fatty. The way her body panics when faced with the dead while her mind and eyes turn narrow-focused on the job that is to be done. Her thoughts are clear even as her stomach twists and her heart races. She helps the ship’s doctor make record of the dead—her voice is rough from the dust in her throat as she pronounces their names—and then she leaves, the sole survivor, a hero coated in dirt and gore.

It takes forty minutes in the shower before the water runs clear. Even after she’s washed the dust from her eyes, she does not go to the ship windows to look for stars. What constellations watch over Akuze can be of no comfort to her. Instead, she drinks the stiff drinks the ship’s crew offer her until her mind is quiet enough for sleep.

She attends all the funerals, after. In her mind she hears snapping bones and screams and rumbling earth beneath the eulogies. Every time the dead are named, she remembers their names in her own voice in the med bay, the abrasiveness in her own throat. She remembers the smell of their insides, and though she vomits after every single funeral she cries at none of them.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s another few years before they name her Spectre and send her chasing across the galaxy with her own crew after a rogue Turian. In those years, she never goes back to Earth. She travels from tiny binary systems to huge planets orbiting brand new stars, and in each place she traces out new constellations. She does not look for the speck of Earth in the distant sky; instead she hunts down Arcturus, and her favorite stars from childhood, and the dim light of the twin suns that burn over Akuze.

Still Earth finds her, on the Normandy, among the aliens and colonists. There’s another Earthborn human there, and his name is Kaidan, and he has a dumb smile and a smart mind and he is always arguing with her not about what’s best or what’s smart but only what is _right_. Still he covers her back on the battlefields and drinks strange colony beers with her in the aftermath of each mission. He calls her _commander_ like it means something. His skin smells a little like pine trees, sticky junipers, and he radiates heat like an engine when they sit close in the drop shuttle. Even after the worst and most devastating battles, under the gore and the sweat, he smells like home, like Earth.

She tries not to think about what the inside of his skull smells like. But after a few months, when she dreams of Akuze and rippling rock and the eruption of thresher maws from beneath, she hears him screaming alongside the old crew. She wakes thinking of the way he says _commander_ and of what it should mean, not just to him but to her, and she tries not to think of the way he smiles at her. It works, for a while.

But then she catches him on the observation deck, looking at the stars, and before she can say anything he says, sheepishly, _such different stars from the ones we saw back home_. And she hasn’t told this crew about the stars, or her father, or even Akuze, but he’s another earthborn a million lightyears from home and here he is looking at the stars. So she sits beside him, close to the window, and she tells him about her stargazing nights before her father was sent to Arcturus.

He listens, and then he tells her about the chintzy telescope on his parents’ deck in Vancouver. It had a scratched lens, but if you knew what you were doing, you could see Jupiter in the daytime. _Another world,_ he says, like remembering an old friend, _close enough to see when the lights are still on._

The next night, by unspoken agreement, they come back and hunt down the stars that make up Ursa Minor in Earth’s skies. The next night, Orion. The next, Cygnus.

* * *

It’s three weeks before she catches him looking at her instead of the stars. They are tracing out constellations in the foreign starscape as they orbit some empty planet. Three distant suns and a binary system curl across the sky in a shape not unlike Ursa Minor on Earth, and they’re rallying silly names back and forth— _Ursa Minorest, Ursa Minor Minor—_ when he goes silent and she turns to look at him, and he is so close to her.

Earth and its stars and every scrap of humanity are so far away, but he is here tracing shapes in the sky with her, and he is sitting so close. He is looking right back at her, unblinking.

She wonders then, with a start, what he would taste like. Hoppy beer and sweat, probably, the pine smell of his skin, or cinnamon maybe, like her spreading heat cinnamon boy on Arcturus, who kissed like they had a million years to do it and whose skull came apart into six pieces under the weight of a thresher maw, it smelled like sweet grass and fresh mud when his brains slipped out of his macerated helmet in the med bay with the doctors asking softly, _do you know who this was_ —

_Was—_

And she can’t kiss him then, even though he looks like he wants it as bad as she does. She can’t say anything, can’t do anything, but from the way his brow creases she knows she’s broken this moment. He’s still looking at her, waiting for an explanation. Her mind hums and she tries to find words, something to say, some thought in her brain other than _do you know who this was, who this was, was was was…_

Her throat is dry. She mumbles only _sorry_ , and turns back to the stars.

He asks _for what._

She doesn’t have an answer.

* * *

Ashley Williams is dead and it’s just more blood on her hands. Williams, Jenkins, every soldier on Akuze, her mother and father a lifetime ago; names in a long list of lives she could’ve saved. The Normandy is speeding away before the bombs go off and she knows, by now, it’s happened. They ripped from Virmire’s atmosphere into the calm, silent vacuum of space before the explosions, but still she imagines them. She knows Ashley is dead, knows the whole planet has been reduced to ash. If they went back there would be no body to find, but still Shepard remembers the smell and the sight of the med bay after Akuze, Ashley’s face among the pieces of old companions. Still Shepard imagines that any of the viewports on the Normandy would show her nothing but Virmire collapsing in flames.

Shepard sits in an interior room on the center deck, as far from any viewing port as she can be. Kaidan sits with her, in silence, for a long time. Her elbows are on her knees and her head is in her hands and she doesn’t see when he arrives, but she knows from the soft sound of his breathing that he’s there.

Eventually he says _you did what you could, commander,_ and he says her title like a compliment. She feels his hand come to rest heavy on her shoulder with the smallest squeeze of comfort. He pulls it away before he says, in a smaller voice, _I’m sorry._

She looks up at him then, sees the pain twisting his face and the way he blinks faster as he tries not to cry. She sees him breathing and alive and in one piece, a soldier she saved.

And she says, _for what?_

He doesn’t answer. He sighs instead, a heavy breath, and her mind replays the sound for hours after. The breath of her soldier. This time, she saved one.


	4. Chapter 4

They find out about the reapers and she comes ringing alarm bells and still the council will not listen. She is branded _traitor_ , _disgrace,_ _mutineer_. It’s another moment she will never be enough for, another catastrophe that she cannot control. She’s had a lot of them by now. Before, there’s always been a next step. When the enemy escapes, you chase him down. When your whole crew is slaughtered, you go to the funerals. When the credits run out, you learn to live with the lights off.

She’s in her quarters with the room dark and her head in her hands when Kaidan knocks. He’s stumbling over his words, tense but earnest, when he swears he’s with her until the end of this one. _The whole crew is_ , he says, breathless as he betrays the council for some imagined greater good. Their ship and their crew are so small, and there’s a whole galaxy to save, and she can tell he knows it from the way his hands shake. She can’t promise anything will work out, can’t promise him that their little frigate and their prototype weaponry can keep them alive long enough to be sentenced by the council for mutiny. But she can take his hands in hers, and hold them until the trembling stops.

He laces his fingers through hers, and squeezes. There’s a second before he lets go. He starts to say something about _if we don’t make it through this_ , and she hears the turmoil in his voice. It’s the dissonance between what is right and what, after the fallout with the council and the mutiny of the Normandy, is left.

There are rules against fraternization, but they are alliance rules and this is now a stolen ship with a disgraced crew. And they’re going to die—she’s saved him once but that was luck, a lucky break, one in a million—but he’s here now. He’s alive and she’s alive and there’s one more day before the end, before Ilos rises up in the viewport to meet them and the ground blocks out the stars and Sovereign descends on this galaxy. And he is close and his hands have stopped shaking and he smiles when he speaks next and says _Shepard, you make me feel human_.

The sky will fall tomorrow, but when she finally kisses him it feels like every world in the galaxy stops turning.

* * *

The end comes at daybreak.

She wakes weak-kneed and heavy-limbed, her sheets tangled between his legs and his arms wrapped around her waist. His skin is warm against hers, like sunshine, and he’s mumbling something inarticulate but endearing, still too tired to open his eyes. And then Joker’s voice rings out over the ship intercom, _coming into Ilos_ , and this moment is over and the end is here and all she can do is the work in front of her.

She’s never had the chance to say goodbye before; her crewmates on Akuze snatched from the ground in an instant, her father incinerated by missile fire a trillion miles away, her mother gone with _two full weeks left_ by the doctor’s best estimate. There’s never been an opportunity to figure out how to talk to someone for what may be the last time. He’s dressing now, hurriedly, on the opposite side of the bed, and she can tell from the way he’s holding each breath a little too long that he’s thinking hard about what to say to her in this moment. He tries, then, to say something meaningful, a thank you, a goodbye. Instead she interrupts him and asks only _are you ready._

He meets her eyes and says _yes_.

They board the ground shuttle without speaking. But when she sees his fingers trembling as they push away from the Normandy and toward the surface of Ilos, she reaches out and takes his hand in hers.

* * *

There’s a citadel full of people to save, and so the council dies.

There were bodies in the streets and in the alleys all the way to the presidium chambers. Crumpled geth keen like radio static, husks groan and retch, civilians scream until something silences them. It’s not Akuze, it’s an entirely different hell, smelling like singed metal and ash and opened bodies. Shepard and her crew work through it all, step by step. There are a lot of lives she doesn’t save, but for now her crew is storming down the halls behind her, breathing hard and swearing. Even as she steps over civilians—very old, sometimes, or very young, weeping or silent or in pieces—she tells herself _this will be something to grieve after_ , and she does not remind herself how unlikely it is that where will be an after at all.

Each time she turns a corner and her crew is still behind her, it is a tiny victory. They are sweating and tired and she sees in their eyes that they are tucking away their own grief and pain for later. But for now, to her, it is enough that they are alive.

The choice comes to her to risk delay and loss of firepower to save the council. If the fleet does not divert from the citadel, the council will die; if they do abandon their fire against Sovereign, the citadel may fall. In spite of all the death Shepard has swept past on her way to the presidium, there are still so many lives on the citadel to save.

And so the council dies.

It will be something to grieve after.

* * *

There are explosions, and shattered glass, and hungry flames. The citadel is crumbling from within and without. The station’s oxygen processing systems can’t filter out the smoke fast enough. Alarms sound. There’s gunfire in the distance. Voices scream and beg for help, from each other, from C-sec, from the Alliance, from silent gods.

Still, Saren dies.

Saren dies and Sovereign falls and there are no more reapers slinking from distant space. The geth reinforcements fall back and the bullets stop flying and there’s a blessed near-silence in the citadel after the agonizing clamor of the past hours. There’s a moment where Shepard can look at her crew and finally _exhale_ and live in this instant where they are alive, all of them, somehow this time she has done enough—

And then the ground rumbles, like Akuze all those years ago, and columns groan and ceiling tiles come crashing down. There’s no knowing if it’s the effect of some nearby detonation or debris from the battle outside hitting the citadel, but the sky is falling, there’s cracked marble and shattered glass tumbling from above, and then there is blackness.


	5. Chapter 5

When she wakes, there are broken bones (hers) and the smell of burnt armor (hers). Voices cry out to rouse a fallen comrade ( _Shepard_ , they’re saying) and then there are hands on her, heaving her out of the rubble. And in spite of the pain and the grief rising up now, she looks around and counts faces, counts Anderson and Garrus and Liara and Wrex and Tali and even Kaidan, breathing hard with a hand to his ribs, but still breathing.

The others help her to the med bay, back on the Normandy. It smells only of isopropanol, sterile and astringent. The soldiers argue, lazily, about whose bumps and bruises are to be bandaged first. The doctor splints her broken arm and congratulates her on defeating Saren and the reaper. _Thanks for saving the whole galaxy,_ Dr. Chakwas says, with a wry smile, and then sends her upstairs to rest. It feels like a million years since she’s had a chance to sleep.

Shepard passes Kaidan on her way out the door. He greets her with _commander_ , serious for a moment, and then his face breaks into a relieved smile and he says _I’m glad you’re okay_.

There are rules and consequences and things will have to go back to normal very quickly, and so she says _I’m glad you made it, lieutenant,_ and continues on her way. Alone, she returns to her quarters, sinks into bed, and before she fades into sleep she tells herself that it is enough to know that he is alive.

_It is enough to have saved him_.

She sleeps, heavy and dreamless.

In the morning she tells herself _it is enough_ but she goes to the observation deck and he is looking at the stars. And this time she backs him up against the glass of the window and runs her bandaged hands through his hair and kisses him; he tastes like hoppy beer from last night and soaped skin and that pine smell of his hair, and when she finally stops he says _oh, Shepard, I’m so glad you’re okay_. His hand is gripping her broken arm and there’s a burn on her jaw that is absolutely flaming with pain now, but she laughs, giddy with having survived. And she says _I’m glad we made it_ , and the way he smiles back at her puts her heart in her throat and makes her stomach leap, head-over-handlebars, in spite of the exhaustion and the aches and pains.

* * *

They are not brought before a court-martial. A new council is assembled without anyone breathing a word about mutiny or betrayal or the fact that Shepard was more than a little bit responsible for theft of a warship. Even Captain Anderson looks the other way when he catches Kaidan slipping out of Shepard’s quarters in the morning.

It turns out a lot can be forgiven if you save all life in the galaxy from annihilation.

Instead there are awards ceremonies and celebrations and awkward interviews for the news channels. It’s not long before Shepard is sent back to Earth for some kind of commendation from the Alliance, her first trip home since her 18th birthday. Normandy’s other earthlings go too, the engineers and soldiers and Kaidan, who holds her hand while their ground shuttle lands. A lifetime ago she daydreamed about the lurch and the rush of leaving Earth’s gravity, but here and now it feels like a sweet gentle tug bringing her home.

After the events and the formalities and more awkward interviews— _how does it feel to be back home on Earth, Commander Shepard?_ —Kaidan takes her to his parents’ home in Vancouver, where everything smells like pine. He takes her on out on the deck and brings a little too much of his favorite local beer. It’s barely after noon on a Tuesday, _but we saved the goddamn galaxy_ , he says, uncapping bottles.

She laughs and says _we did_ and clinks her bottle to his. And then they both drink deeply, because it’s been a long road to this moment, and it’s no secret that hops and yeast don’t taste the same in space.

Eventually Kaidan brings out the old telescope with the scratched lens. He’s a little unsteady, but still he finds Jupiter shining in the blue sky, and he shows it to her like he’s sharing a secret.

They’re still on the deck when the stars come out, twinkling one by one into the darkening sky. The constellations are familiar, now, with stars in the same relative places they were for years before Shepard left her little blue world. Polaris shines out the brightest, sparkling from Ursa Minor, and there are the stars of Orion and Cygnus and every distant sun in between.

But old habits die hard, and the imagined lines between stars are harder to see when there’s a row of empty beer bottles on the deck railing. So Kaidan starts tracing new constellations first, and then Shepard joins in, the two of them on their backs, pointing their fingers into the sky. They find absurd shapes and come up with ridiculous names, most of them obscene. And though she’s traveled lightyears across space and seen suns rise and set on a hundred worlds, Shepard is sure she’s never laughed as hard as this, here in the nighttime on her tiny home planet, where the air smells like pine.


End file.
